Muna Madan

Gurkha Nepalese Community (GNC), a Sydney-based Nepalese community organization, is staging Muna Madan as part of its annual Dashain festivities this year. A casual conversation with a dear friend of mine who also happens to be one half of a GNC power couple inspired the following thoughts about the most popular lyrical drama of the youngest Himalayan republic.

• Muna Madan is arguably the greatest work of Nepal's unarguably the greatest poet, Laxmi Prasad Devkota


• A miniature masterpiece, the work partly owes it popular appeal to its use of folk idioms and metres


• The drama centres around the trials and travails of a high-caste migrant worker journeying to Lhasa (Tibet) for work and back


• Apart from the constraints placed by a traditional society on romantic love, the drama also highlights the twin evils of casteism and manpower drain that have impeded Nepal's emergence from the dark shadows of its past


• The most famous line from Muna Madan, spoken by the high-caste protagonist to a "lowly" Bhote who nurses him back to health, is: "Man becomes great not by caste, but by heart"